The train arrives in Frankfurt an der Oder, the first city in the German Democratic Republic, surrounded on both sides by streamers that read: “Welcome, Young Pioneers!” The conductor explains that in order to continue on to West Berlin, we will need to move from the fourth carriage, where we now are, to the first carriage, because the rest of the train will be decoupled at the Hauptbahnhof of East Berlin. As we drag our luggage down the crowded corridors, customs agents and policemen decide to start checking passengers again. First they stamp passports; then they take our currency declarations; last of all, they inspect the baggage. Each time we are obliged to open bags and suitcases, to the mockery of the Germans packed into the corridors. The last conductor is a little man with a big, sad, droopy mustache, and he asks Agnieszka something in Polish. She turns sharply around and hisses a single word. He opens his eyes, turns red, and flees. “He wanted to know what I had in my bag,” Agnieszka explains with a big smile. “Panties, I told him.”
While we speak, the train enters the eastern outskirts of Berlin. We’ve run out of time; there’s no way we’re going to make it to the first carriage before the train stops. Oh well, the passengers heading for the West will just hop off at the station and move up the platform to the first carriage, right? Alas, as we’ll discover, once you get off, it’s forbidden to reboard. We’re now going to have to take the subway and S-Bahn to the Friedrichstraße station, get in line, and cross the border on foot, dragging our suitcases after us. The passport and luggage checks are very slow: more than two hours, half of that in the rain. First Agnieszka laughs; then she curses; then she falls silent. She has a Polish passport and the Berlin Wall to get through. You can’t be born in Poznan and—when faced with the eyes of a policeman, a passport stamp, and a border—fail to feel small and be a little afraid.
Fasting on the Istanbul Express
When the Orient Express, on October 4, 1883, left Paris on its inaugural trip, it took several journalists along, an indication that the profession even then had instincts for everything that’s luxurious and free of charge. They described, with an abundance of details, the delights of the train that connected two worlds, Europe and Asia. The bathrooms were lined with Italian marble, the lounge car was furnished like a London club, the glasses were made of Baccarat crystal, and the appetizers were based on oysters and caviar. A few minor details have changed, let us say: on the Istanbul Express there is no first-class service, there is no dining car, and the marble bathrooms have been replaced by an explanation (fifty-four separate points) in Bulgarian concerning the operation of the restrooms. There are, however, hundreds of Turks, who toss bags of garbage out the window, which, perhaps because they seem unable to hit anyone, they keep on trying for the rest of the trip.
Before boarding the Istanbul Express, I had taken a train at dawn from Berlin south through the German Democratic Republic, running past the giant factories dedicated to Walter Ulbricht, through cities with names as hard as rock (Lutherstadt Wittenberg), leaving the great northern European plain near Leipzig, rising through the mountains, and entering the Federal Republic of Germany. Toward evening, the Istanbul Express, a Yugoslavian and Bulgarian train, departs Munich. The Serbian conductor cooks onions and pork in his lodgings and wants to be left alone, the Turkish emigrants are busy with their farewells, and lanky Scandinavian couples are sharing bread and chocolate, each eyeing with greater fondness the chocolate in the hands of his or her traveling companion. This hardly seems like the train of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie, nor the one in which Lady Diana, Maurice Dekobra’s heroine (in The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, 1925), announced: “I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may stop off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or the color of the eyes of my neighbor in the compartment.”
This express to the Orient arrives at the Yugoslavian border around midnight, and the Slovenian customs officers throw open the doors to the compartments with all the courtesy of John Wayne barging into a saloon. Following them comes the Serbian conductor, breath reeking of onions as he announces, “Croatians, Slovenians, and Serbs all get along,” and ten minutes later, he sticks his head back in and says, “That’s not true.” Last of all comes a policeman, who starts out with these words: “You foreigners are crazy to ride on our trains, with our tracks that are one jolt after another, and the danger of getting your passports stolen.” I thank him for the heartfelt encouragement and try to get some sleep, trying to make up my mind whether it’s papirni ubrusi that means “paper towels” in Serbo-Croatian, while zabranjeno pušenje means “no smoking,” or whether it’s the other way around.
After an agitated night, during the course of which Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs take turns shouting outside the train windows in various stations, the Istanbul Express arrives in Belgrade, where several cars disappear. I’m moved to a Bulgarian second-class berth, which is better than the American humorist Robert Benchley might have led one to expect in the 1930s (“Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria”). The cars are reasonably clean, and the conductor—who has the contented demeanor of a delicatessen butcher—offers me a bottle of Balgarsko Pivo, the beer of the Balkans, and makes sure to walk close to Scandinavian girls in tunnels, hoping for a sudden jolt of the train.
Niš, in southern Serbia, constituted the last outpost until 1889 for those who rode in the cars of the Orient Express. Here passengers were loaded onto stagecoaches and transported to the Bulgarian city of Tatar Pazardzhik (little market of the Tatars), 175 miles away, a trip that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits did its very best to present as a captivating adventure, but which actually unfolded under the greedy eyes of Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian bandits. A hundred years later, the great-grandsons of those same bandits wave at the train as they fish on the river Nišava, surround it in the Palanka railway station, and spy on it at Pirot, the ancient Roman Turres—famous for its carpets and for a hotel, Le Roi de Serbie, where at the end of the nineteenth century an overnight stay cost a single Belgian franc. Any room they assigned you was always “the king’s room,” in commemoration of some passing king, never accurately identified.
Once we pass through Tsaribrod—nowadays called Dimitrovgrad, in honor of the Bulgarian Lenin—the train enters Bulgaria and seems to take on the indolent ways of the Balkans: it stops for no reason by a stand of fruit trees, half-built houses, and local trains (putnichki), which seem to have been left there to fill up the landscape, but instead suddenly depart, with their load of wide-eyed women and children, heading off toward some tiny destination with a name written in Cyrillic characters. Around here, back in the day, King Boris of Bulgaria would stop the Orient Express and, claiming that the railways were his own personal property, take the controls of the locomotive and indulge his love of trains. Obsessed with a fear of delays, he’d always drive at top speed, endangering the boilers and the coronary arteries of engineers and firemen, who would turn pale whenever they saw him coming down the tracks in his white uniform. The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which was afraid of making a royal enemy, never did figure out how to discourage him.
We arrive in Sofia while the sun shines low under the cantilevered platform roofs, and armed soldiers keep passengers from approaching the train. The Turkish guest workers of Nuremberg and Berlin shoot anxious glances out the window, and for an hour they abstain from throwing trash onto the tracks. As the train departs for Plovdiv and we plunge into our second night, the sensation begins to spread among the passengers of now being residents of the Istanbul Express: they stroll; they converse; they stretch their sheets over their bunks and watch the sun sink behind the Vakarel Pass, where Frederick Barbarossa’s crusaders once marched, full of intentions both holy and wicked. In Kostenets the railway crosses the Maritsa River, and then descends into the plains. It leaves behind it the lights of Pazardzhik, which in 1870 still had twenty mosques and was the third-largest market in the Turkish Emp
ire; it stops for ten minutes in Plovdiv, the Philippopolis of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; it continues rolling toward the border, running past empty streets, forsaken outskirts, tobacco fields, and a brightly lit discotheque, which glitters for a moment in the darkness and then vanishes again in the night of eastern Thracia.
In Svilengrad, Bulgarian policemen wake everyone up just before two in the morning, banging their flashlights like clubs on the doors of the compartments. At four in the morning, it’s their Turkish counterparts’ turn; they force the passengers to get off at Kapikule and line up in front of a station office. The train doesn’t depart until six thirty in the morning, leaving behind it the mountains of household possessions of the Bulgarians who are fleeing their faltering country; it passes Edirne, the ancient Adrianople, and runs through fields of sunflowers and dust. It rolls past Cerkezköv, where in 1891 a group of rebels under the orders of a certain Anasthatos derailed the Orient Express and took twenty prisoners. Only around noon does it heave within view of the Sea of Marmara. The train, running two hours late, pulls into Istanbul’s Sirkeci Terminal, which is separated from Helsinki by 3,114 miles of Actually Existing Socialism.
I didn’t know at the time that I’d witnessed, from a train, the last summer of Communism. And after the summer comes the fall. In the following months Soviet-backed regimes in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria collapsed. The Soviet Union (USSR) itself dissolved at the end of 1991.
9
From Naples to London: Across Europe with Little Donald
Shaking his head, Donald Trump approaches Stazione Napoli Centrale on Wednesday afternoon. When people see him, they smile. He ignores everyone, from the lowly vantage point of his pedestal. He hasn’t purchased a ticket, but that’s no cause for concern: bobbleheads travel free. “Chillo è pazz’, e o’ coreano chiatto è pure peggio!” hisses a matron in Neapolitan dialect as she passes us. “That guy’s crazy, and the fat Korean is even worse.” She doesn’t like Kim Jong-un, of course. She has no idea that I’m going to have to travel with the other character for the entire three-day duration of the train trip that lies ahead of me.
I’m taking a train from Naples all the way to London. I want to know what Europeans think of Donald Trump, a year after his election. Why the bobblehead statuette? Well, first things first: unlike the original, it keeps its mouth shut and it doesn’t tweet. More than that, my traveling companion has a singular advantage. I won’t have to ask strangers what they think of Donald Trump. They’ll approach and tell me, unasked. (Wrong! as Mr. Trump would say.)
The 3:15 train to Rome and Milan awaits us at Track 8. It’s not easy to get there. Our photographer, Giulio Piscitelli, is forced to lie on the pavement, Trump-high. This doesn’t go unnoticed. A crowd starts to form. One distinguished-looking Neapolitan professional, with his standard-issue briefcase, chuckles: “As long as he stays small, I’m okay with it. But what if he gets a swelled head and decides to run for the White House?”
Two illegal vendors (selling socks, for the most part) come over. One of them has a sky-blue T-shirt with an English-language slogan: “Camels can go two weeks without drinking. I can’t.” From his breath, I’d have to say he means what his T-shirt says. The other vendor, who wears a baseball cap, asks if he can take a selfie with mini-Trump. He read one of my books about America, years ago. He quotes from it, accurately, and says: “Back in your day, there was no Trump, was there?” Then he heads straight for a gang of tourists.
Naples–Rome–Milan
The train pulls out on schedule: mini-Trump begins his trip across Europe. I place him on the tray table in front of me, in the recessed holder meant for a beverage: he fits perfectly. The little statuette wins an unspoken popularity contest. People go by, see him, and generally smile. Are they smiling because they are silent Trump supporters or because they think the bobblehead is funny? Or maybe I am funny? I’ll never know. I can’t question every smile on the railway. Occasionally, a passerby will shoot me a worried glance: someone who goes around with Trump, the glance suggests, might be capable of anything.
The conductor comes through checking tickets. “He rides free,” he informs me seriously, gazing at mini-Trump. Two teenagers look up from their cell phones and say: “Trump was voted in by the middle class as a thumb in the eye to the elites.” Signor Tommaso Mestria, who works for the postal service, stops and opines: “The bobblehead is cute; Trump himself, not so much. In any case, he’s not going to be impeached. He’s going to serve the next three years in the White House. No doubt about it, Americans are weird.” Then he changes the subject to Italian politics.
The train stops at Rome’s Termini station, and then pulls out again. Little Trump watches as the train races north through Italy and the afternoon descends into evening. I change my seat, to avoid the low afternoon sunlight, but in Bologna four young women board the train and, rightly, claim their ticketed seats. I ask them if they want to keep Trump until Milan. “Thanks, but let’s not and say we did,” they reply.
Little Trump, in the silent high-speed train car, is a star. I suspect some passengers pretend to need the lavatory so they can come close and look at him. Some make faces; one snorts; a few roll their eyes. References to Silvio Berlusconi? None. That may come as a surprise to my American readers, but I expected it. True, the similarities between the two men are obvious. Both are loud, vain, blustering businessmen, amateur politicians, and professional womanizers. Both have a troubled relationship with their egos and their hair. Both think God is their publicist, and twist religion to suit their own ends. There is a difference, though. Mr. Berlusconi was the longest-serving Italian head of government since World War II (not much came out of it, apart from a lasting friendship with Vladimir Putin); but today, in a troubled world, he’s seen by many Italians as an avuncular, reassuring figure. Mr. Trump, the demagogue in chief, is still controversial—everywhere, even in the bobblehead version on a high-speed Italian train.
Half an hour out of Milan, a well-dressed young woman sitting a couple of yards away points to the statuette. “The company that makes that thing is called Royal Bobbles, and is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia.” Excuse me, but how do you happen to know that? “The work I do.” Do you work for Trump? “No, no. But those little bobblehead statues generate issues that you couldn’t begin to imagine. I work in the field of intellectual property, trademarks, copyright, you know? I’m on my way from Rome now—that’s exactly what I’ve just been working on.” Wait, there’s an Italian who’s being considered for bobblehead status? Who? I ask in astonishment. “That I can’t tell you. You’d never guess the name, and anyway, whoever said it was an Italian?” she replies with a smile. I take her business card: her name is Silvia and she works for a well-known international law firm in Milan. I’m left with my curiosity unslaked. Trump, as always, remains impassive: he’s not interested in knowing who his successors will be.
Milan–Paris
The next morning, another train, this time to Paris. The TGV leaves from Porta Garibaldi station at 8:45. Trump is sticking out of my backpack, with his usual spiteful glare. Two boys stop me: “Excuse me, sir, why is he in your backpack?”
“I’m taking him to London.”
They exchange a glance, and then, as if my answer made perfect sense, reply: “Oh, of course.” On the train, the air-conditioning is icy—most unusual, in Europe—and the silence is surreal. It seems this train knows it’s about to leave talkative Italy and entering more introverted France.
Turin’s Porta Susa station in the sunlight, then Oulx Sestriere, followed by Bardonecchia and the border. The first French city is Modane. France tumbles down out of the mountains. The train speeds along over the plains and alongside lakes. We leave Lyon to the west. The light of continental Europe bounces off the water and into the sky. The Donald—credit where credit is due—proves to be an excellent traveling companion. He lets me read, never budge
s from his recessed cup holder, and silently listens to the hushed rustling of newspapers. Maybe he’s waiting for me to finish the article in The Economist that talks about him.
* * *
In this car, talking on the phone is forbidden, but some of us don’t seem to know that. Thus, all of these are duly scolded: yours truly, who in turn scolds an Englishman, who thereupon scolds a German. All my attempts to introduce the forty-fifth American president into the conversation fail miserably. If my fellow passengers are not allowed to speak on the phone, fair enough, they won’t. But they don’t want to talk about Donald Trump?
The statuette, as we have seen, belongs to the bobblehead series. These characters are also known as Nodders (because of the way their heads nod) or Wobblers (ditto). Basically, when they are moved, they shake their heads. And on a train, that means their heads never stand still. Those who pass by and happen to spot The Donald where you might expect a bottle of mineral water shake their heads, too. “Do you mind my telling you that that thing gets on my nerves?” says a woman with a Piedmontese accent. Just like the original does, I tell her.
The company, as we’ve learned, is based in Alpharetta, Georgia. I visited there in 2009, at the height of the subprime crisis. It would never have occurred to me that I might one day travel with what might fairly be considered an honorary citizen. Bobblehead statues have different prices. The most expensive are the customized versions: for $79 you can have your mother-in-law’s head (on a premade body); for $145, you can get your whole mother-in-law from the circles under her eyes to her big toes. On the Web site www.bobbleheads.com, The (mass-produced) Donald costs only $19.95. As I look at him, I feel a twinge of pity. So cheap.
Off the Rails Page 19